NeighborScapes

When I was fourteen, I had my first “job.” My mom was volunteering at a school in Richton Park, teaching behind-the-curve first graders to read. Most of them had already memorized the four books the classroom had, and could figure out the story line by pictures. They needed new content. So, after school every day, I would write simple letters with short words to these five students. Writing back to me was not a classroom requirement, but the incentive of receiving a letter from a pen pal was enough to get them to write back to me more often than they’d turn in their (required) homework. And every day, my mom and her student would read through the last few letters that we had written back and forth- and, if there was a new one, the student would very excitedly open the decorated envelope and tackle the new content.

Of these five, Jawan stands out particularly. While the others would write back to me maybe once a week, Jawan would send very short letters every day, and pack content into those letters. I could tell that receiving mail from somebody really made a difference in his life. We must have exchanged a good fifteen letters a month, which was impressive, since they were written outside of class time but during the school day; he was writing them during his lunch hour or recess or free class time. And he was puzzling through the letters when my mom wasn’t around to remind him of the tricky words. It may be my memory and the nostalgia playing in, but I think his vocabulary grew, too, for the few months I worked with him.

Mid-March, he disappeared. We still don’t know what happened to him; he just stopped showing up to class one day. My mom and I frantically combed the news, but the teacher and principal said that, when a young, very poor, low-skills Black boy stops showing up to class one day, nobody thinks much of it; he’s moved, or started going to school with a relative, or something.

I don’t know if the school ever tracked him down, or if he ever returned. I had bonded to this child, and was badly shaken by his abrupt disappearance and by the way the district took it in stride. I finished up the year with the rest of the students, and then switched to frequent but not sustained one-off  volunteering through a local youth group instead.

By the time I was eighteen, I was back in the classroom, again, this time through my college. Twelve hours a week, I was providing support to a crowded Bronzeville classroom, either in helping students concentrate from across a sea of heads, or taking individuals or small groups out into the hallway to catch up on remedial skills. I must have spent upwards of sixty hours teaching Kendra the differences between b, d, p and q, which, let me tell you, was NOT made easier by the rhyming of the first three of those. Seven months later, Kendra had about an 80% understanding that letters have shapes, names, and sounds, and that you need to know all three to make and read words- but that, once you do know how to make a word, it’s really easy to make lots of other words by just changing one letter. It was a stressful job, and a frustrating job, but it was a fun job, and a fulfilling job, and I returned to the program my second year, to be placed at a different school.

I was nominally placed to teach fourth graders how to write stories. I wound up in a first grade class, again teaching remedial students basic shapes, colors and letters. I spent nearly every day working with Angel. I say “nearly” because Angel was missing from class about one day of every five. Angel was widely picked on by her classmates, and would respond by hitting or biting them, then be punished by the school, resulting in a note home. The next day, she would stay home, and the day after, she would come back with a note that she had been sick. The teacher and I suspected that something was up, but we guessed Angel’s mom, who tended to be a strict disciplinarian, either kept Angel home as punishment or to give her some time to cool off and give her classmates some time to forget. It didn’t work, of course; the classmates considered Angel somewhat wild and continued to pick on her, and Angel continued to respond the only way she knew how.

I found Angel to be a sweet girl who sincerely wanted to learn. She was a shrewd negotiator for candy or treats, and my barter system to teach her to trade correct flash cards for treats or toys was constantly under assault from her attempts to leverage more rewards per card. She was a cuddle junkie and had absolutely no problem drawing me picture books and telling me stories to go with the pictures.

Early April, Angel, too, disappeared. She left on the day after a fight, so teacher and I expected her back two days later, but she failed to show up. The teacher, too, assumed Angel had transferred to a different, maybe better, school. While I was again devastated by our inability to follow up and find her, it didn’t hit as hard as the first time, and I continued to work.

Angel came back a month and a half later, with trips of taking a sailboat out to sea. She stayed with the classroom the rest of the year.

Last year, I met Tamara. Tamara was an enthusiastic, together woman who was also doing a year of service, while taking care of her son, maintaining her house, and looking at continuing in her line of work after the service program was over. We became instant, and good, friends, played off each others’ ideas for improving the program, ourselves and each other, and assisted each other’s job searches as much as we could. Even though our work sites were a good forty-five minutes away from each other’s, we would make time at least once or twice a month to have dinner together and make plans. But in February, Tamara’s expenses became far higher than her income, and she stopped being able to do things like get to work and continue to be paid, or keep her son in day care while she worked. Her job relied on her ability to be on site and not have a five-year-old on site, so the goodwill she built up by being a stellar employee was quickly squandered by her inability to be a stellar employee when she had no resources to assist her, and she failed to complete her year of service. She was missing from my sight, her supervisor’s sight, and her colleagues’ site for months at a time, and when she came back, it became a regular thing that I would do a month’s worth of laundry and dishes for her, clean her house, feed her son, and negotiate her back to work. Her car eventually died, and that’s when she dropped out of my life.

Megan is eighteen. She comes and goes from NeighborScapes. She has no car and her housing isn’t always stable, so she works enthusiastically when she’s back but is gone for long stretches of time. She’s trying hard to find a sustainable job, move out of her parents’ house, while still making responsible decisions about her personal life, her education, and her career. She’s by far one of the most responsible eighteen-year-olds I’ve ever met, fighting hard to be an adult when she has almost no resources to make the process any easier.

There’s a lot of talk around my operations through NeighborScapes about cradle through college covenants of care, of forever narratives, of being reliable and constant. It’s painful and confusing and frustrating to invest in someone, while always remembering that they can disappear from your life and you may never be able to follow up or find out what happened to them. It’s incredibly difficult to structure a continuum of care, from teaching Angel her colors and letters to teaching Kendra her alphabet to teaching Jawan to read, while also providing a good first job for Megan and supporting Tamara as she gets a job that can support her, her home, and her son- while also planning for large pockets of time in which Tamara has no car, in which Angel has disappeared, and also planning for the possibility that Jawan will disappear and not come back.

But this source of stability may be one of few sources of stability in their lives. Tamara knows she can rely on me to cheer her up, pick her up, loan her a pair of boots long enough that she can get a grasp on her bootstraps. We do not give up on Kendras that simply cannot understand alphabets. We do not give up on Angels who don’t understand peaceful conflict resolution. And we don’t give up on CLCs that have made mistakes in their lives, or don’t know routes to good jobs, or who need guidance and support.

Megan called me today. She’s back in town, and is looking for work. I have sustainable housing to offer her, as well as some leads to jobs that will put the housing within her income range and that she can access by public transportation. That’s what I do; I connect people to resources and provide follow-up, sustained care and support until Jawan is reading, until Megan is working, until Tamara has a career.

Welcome back, Megan. And Jawan, if you’re reading this, look me up. I still owe you a letter. You’d be about nineteen by now.

Chris Furuya is the program coordinator for NeighborScapes, a volunteering, community organizing, and civic leadership nonprofit located in the South suburbs of Chicago. Her twitter handle is earthangelNS.